Michel Houellebecq, one of France’s most famous novelists, had released a novel back in 2015 titled Submission. The novel focuses around a middle-aged literature professor who witnesses France slowly turning towards and embracing Islam. It depicts Islam or, more specifically, political Islam as an intuitive remedy for a declining France which has entered enduring stages of political and demographic crises.
The novel received a huge influx of reviews and social commentary following its release, which was almost a decade ago, and readers may already be aware of the particulars and the subsequent reactions. What I’d like to focus on here, however, is one particular detail within the novel—that of the main character being a specialist on Joris-Karl Huysmans. For those that might not be aware, Huysmans was a 19th-century writer who represents an understudied trend of modern French intellectual history: the mass conversions of intellectuals to Roman Catholicism.
Huysmans’ development took place in the so-called fin de siècle France—the French expression used to refer to the concluding decades of the 19th century. This was a period which saw the effects of the industrial revolution, including the mechanization of labor and the harsh conditions for workers. The creeping urbanization and the submerging individualism all conspired to create a sense of existential angst among Europeans, who started to lose faith in their prized notion of progress. This then led to political upheavals in the forms of nationalist movements, such as the Revolutions of 1848; and socialist revolts, such as the Paris Commune of 1871.
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Among the intellectual class, it gave rise to a generalized disillusionment with the dogmas of liberal modernity, including cold rationality. Representative thinkers of this period included German philosophers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
Maxx Nordau, a co-founder of the Zionist movement, had famously coined the medical term “degeneracy” to describe this era. (If you’d like to gain a better understanding of the particular perspective of Nordau, you may refer to an older article of ours titled “The 19th Century Jewish Critique of Modern Liberal Western Degeneracy.”)
Late English historian John Wyon Burrow has documented all of these various social and scientific contexts within his book, The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848–1914 (2000).
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Among the writers, it birthed an ideological posture known as “Aestheticism,” of which Oscar Wilde was the most emblematic figure in the Anglosphere. In France, it was Huysmans, whose first major novel, À rebours (Against Nature, 1888), had as its protagonist an eccentric man who, in the name of the old aristocracy, demeans the world of the new bourgeoisie (centered around materialism). It was a slow novel full of internal monologues and was almost plotless. It was nonetheless a forerunner to the later works of Robert Musil, which offered a critical eye regarding the liberal West (this dichotomy between aristocratic Europe and the modern West has been touched upon in our article on vampires).
Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly was also very well known in his time and was himself a secular writer turned Christian. He famously told Huysmans after reading his novel that the author would choose between either death or Christianity, and Huysmans eventually opted for the latter (in a later novel, Là-Bas or “Down There,” published in 1891, he attempted to analyze the vigor of Satanism within French intellectual circles).
And they were not alone.
Besides d’Aurevilly and Huysmans, among the other leading writers of this time who had turned (or returned) to Christianity, there was also Léon Bloy (probably the best pamphleteer of French literature); Paul Claudel (major playwright); Jacques Maritain (most influential modern Catholic philosopher of the country); Francois Mauriac (Nobel laureate); and many, many more.
Similar to Huysmans, all of these individuals were some of the foremost writers and intellectuals of their age, and there are countless other names of lesser-known but still very significant personalities (Frédéric Gugelot has authored an entire book on the subject: La conversion des intellectuels au catholicisme en France, 1885-1935).
But did all of these conversions matter or have any real impact when it came to correcting the course and trajectory of French secularism, known for its old history of radicalism?
The answer is a flat no.
It could be argued that these authors had internalized a modernist, i.e., secularized approach to religion, as they consigned it to mere personal faith and individualist self-discovery, without applying it to the wider questions of society, including politics, economics, and public morality.
To be very clear, this is most certainly not to say that we shouldn’t aim for the conversion of all, including the intellectual class, through da’wah. Islam is open to everyone. In some corners, however, there unfortunately exists a sort of pathetic elitism that aims to fetishize converts to Islam who are from a certain social background or even ethnicity. These individuals thus end up becoming “coveted” converts to those with a serious inferiority complex simply because they have some sort of university background or can speak without a detectable foreign accent, and they are looked up to and treated like authorities despite having zero grounding in traditional Islamic scholarship.
May Allah guide us all. Amin.
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True. French muslims from North Africa have a huge inferiority complex towards French; that is why every french intellectual free-masson who had a little statetement in favor of Islam is seen as a greaaat intellectual who told this and that about islam, even if he did praise islam in order to criticize christianity. But we, muslims from France, did even worst : we praise Maurice Bucaille, the inventor for France of the miracles in the Quran, even if he never told publicly that he reverted.
We are in strong need of scientific validation from french materialists freemason. For instance, some stupid muslims justified covid lockdown and social distanciation through hadith about plagues and the islamic wudu ! Each time some famous people revert to Islam, we listen to him as if he was scholar because we needed Westerners reverts to heal our inferiority complex. Look at Andrew Tate : we listen to him while he have numerous kufr statement.
I wrote “he have” instead of “he has”… such a shame.
What was wrong about social distancing and lockdown. In my opinion, it helped reduce gender mixing a bit.
This inferiorty complex is one of lasting legacies of Colonialism that Muslims all over the world must shake off and embrace/internalize that Islam is the superior way in every aspect.
I see this as a problem more with the older generation of Muslims who lived when the culture of the Europeans was less subverted and when they were more powerful. With the decline of the West and the more degenerate and weaker it becomes, inshaallah less and less muslims will have this inferiority complex.
Inshallah.